Millionaire FastLane Book Club | Part 3 - Chapters 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 | Week 3

The Millionaire Fastlane Book Club

Part 3 | Chapters 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

Hey guys and welcome back to the Millionaire Fastlane book club. I apologize for the delay in getting out this weeks book club. Over the weekend I was painting and had thrown a bunch of stuff in totes and couldn't find my book. 

I wound up downloading Audible, which by the way is awesome, but one frustrating thing is the chapters on the audible app don't even come close to matching up with the chapters in the actual book. Aside from that it got the job done.

So Part 3, here's what we got...

PART 3: POORNESS: THE SIDEWALK

CHAPTER 5: THE SIDEWALK ROADMAP

When you’re the first person whose beliefs are different from what everyone else believes, you’re basically saying, “I’m right, and everyone else is wrong.” That’s a very unpleasant position to be in. It’s at once exhilarating and at the same time, an invitation to be attacked. ~ Larry Ellison

Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions

• A first-class ticket to the Sidewalk is to have no financial plan.
• The Sidewalk’s natural gravitational pull is poorness, both in time and money.
• You cannot solve poor financial management with more money.
• You can be income rich and still ride the Sidewalk dirty.
• If wealth is defined by income and debt, wealth is an illusion, because it is vulnerable to potholes, detours, and “bumps in the road.” When the income disappears, so does the illusion of wealth.
• Poor financial management is like gambling; the house eventually wins.

CHAPTER 6: HAS YOUR WEALTH BEEN TOXIFIED?

Wealth is the ability to fully experience life. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Chapter Quotes and Highlights: 

The Wealth Trinity: What is wealth?

1. Family (relationships)
2. Fitness (health)
3. Freedom (choice)

• The Millionaire Fastlane addresses the FREEDOM portion of the wealth trinity,
• Wealth is strong-spirited familial relationships with people. Not just your family, but with people, your community, your God, and your friends.
• Wealth cannot be experienced alone in a vacuum. Believe me, the richest moments of my life occurred when I was surrounded by a family of friends and loved ones.
• wealth is freedom and choice: freedom to live how you want to live, what, when, and where.

Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions

• Wealth is authored by strong familial relationships, fitness and health, and freedom—not by material possessions.
• Unaffordable material possessions are destructive to the wealth trinity.

CHAPTER 7: MISUSE MONEY AND MONEY WILL MISUSE YOU

Money can’t buy happiness, but it can make you awfully comfortable while you’re being miserable. ~ Clare Boothe Luce

Chapter 7 Quotes and Highlights: 

• The real thief of happiness: servitude, the antithesis of freedom.
• Debt is the leading cause of strife for the newly married. Debt and Lifestyle Servitude keeps people bound to work and unbound to relationships.
• Normal is to believe the illusion that the stock market will make you rich. Normal is to believe that a faster car and a bigger house will make you happy. You’re conditioned to accept normal based on society’s already corrupted definition of wealth, and because of it, normal itself is corrupted. Normal is modern-day slavery.
• “Wealth” and “happiness” are interchangeable, but only if your definition of wealth hasn’t been corrupted by society’s definition. Society says wealth is “stuff,” and because of this faulty definition, the bridge between wealth and happiness collapses.
• The fact is, there are plenty of poor people who live richer than their overworked upper-middle-class counterparts because the latter lack freedom, they lack solid relationships, and they lack health—all deleterious effects of working a hated job five days a week for 50 years.
• Affordability is when you don’t have to think about it. If you have to think about “affordability,” you can’t afford it because affordability carries conditions and consequences.
• Unfortunately, short-term feel-good is often long-term bad. Instant gratification is a populous plague and its predominant side effects are easily spotted: debt and obesity.
• These messages (marketing messages) share one commonality: You’re their prey and the peddlers don’t care if you can afford it or not. Defend yourself by exposing the hook beneath the bait: the bucket of bondage which is Lifestyle Servitude.

Money secures one agent of the wealth formula, freedom, which is a powerful guardian to wealth’s sibling ingredients: health and relationships.

• Money buys the freedom to watch your kids grow up.
• Money buys the freedom to pursue your craziest dreams.
• Money buys the freedom to make a difference in the world.
• Money buys the freedom to build and strengthen relationships.
• Money buys the freedom to do what you love, with financial validation removed from the equation.

Lifestyle Servitude: 

• Work creates income.
• Income creates lifestyle/debt (cars, boats, designer clothes).
• Lifestyle/debt forces work.
• Repeat . . .

Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions

• Money doesn’t buy happiness because money is used for consumer pursuits destructive to freedom. Anything destructive to freedom is destructive to the wealth trinity.
• Money, properly used, can buy freedom, which can lead to happiness.
• Happiness stems from good health, freedom, and strong interpersonal relationships, not necessarily money.
• Lifestyle Servitude steals freedom, and what steals freedom, steals wealth.
• If you think you can afford it, you can’t.
• The consequence of instant gratification is the destruction of freedom, health, and choice.

CHAPTER 8: LUCKY BASTARDS PLAY THE GAME

I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Chapter 8 Quotes and Highlights 

• The right place isn’t on your sofa watching American Idol or slapping greenbacks into thongs at Betty’s Booty Cabaret, or down at the neighborhood bar getting jacked-up on Bud Light while watching the Cubs lose another game. If you want to be at the right place at the right time you indeed have to be at the right place—and the right place knows which places are the wrong places.
• When you consistently act and bombard the world with your efforts, interacting with the waves of others, stuff happens. And that stuff? Sidewalkers interpret it as luck, when it is nothing more than action engaged with better probabilities.
• A Sidewalker’s mindset is anchored in three beliefs that keep them trapped there and vulnerable to moneymaking scams:
  • Belief 1: Luck is needed for wealth.
  • Belief 2: Wealth is an event.
  • Belief 3: Others can give wealth to me.

Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions

• Like wealth, luck is created by process, not by event.
• Luck is created by increased probabilities that are improved with the process of action.
• If you find yourself playing the odds of “big hits,” you are event-driven, not process-driven. This mindset is conducive to the Sidewalk, not the Fastlane.
• “Get Rich Quick” infomercial marketing is a Fastlane because savvy marketers know that Sidewalkers place faith in events over process.
• Moneymaking “systems” are rarely as profitable as the act of selling them to Sidewalkers.

CHAPTER 9: WEALTH DEMANDS ACCOUNTABILITY

Responsibility is the price of greatness. ~ Winston Churchill

Chapter 9 Quotes and Highlights 

• There was a recent labor union rally against Wal-Mart from employees disgruntled with the retailer’s poor wages. A 33-year-old employee named Eugene complained about his employer arguing that he spent three years unloading trucks for $11.15 an hour, which was below the retail industry average of $12.95 an hour. His grievance? He can’t afford a car or Wal-Mart’s health insurance. Wow, how disturbing. Was someone arrested? Seriously, someone should arrest the man who put the loaded gun to Eugene’s head forcing him to work at Wal-Mart for a below-market wage! Give this guy a bitch-slap. No one forced him to work at Wal-Mart; he works there because he chose to work there. Hey, Eugene, if you’re tired of making $11 an hour, raise your value to society. Get your ass over to the library. Wal-Mart can’t offer low wages if they don’t have an endless supply of victims like you.
• Americans once loyally proclaimed, “Give me liberty or give me death.” Now we just say, “Give me.”
• How did we get here? It isn’t complicated: We relied on “others” to make financial decisions for us. We ignored the fine print. We didn’t read the contract. We didn’t read the legislation. We made government an insurance policy. As a society, history is doomed to repeat if we continue to repeat the same behavior.
• Accountability is being culpable to your consequences and modifying your behavior if need be to prevent those consequences.
• Most bad situations are consequences of bad choices. Own them and you own your life.

Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions

• Hitchhikers assign control over their financial plans to others effectively introducing probabilities to victimhood.
• The Law of Victims: You can’t be a victim if you don’t relinquish power to someone capable of making you a victim.
• Responsibility owns your choices.
• Taking responsibility is the first step to taking the driver’s seat of your life. Accountability is the final.